[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF DR. WATTS.
PRESENTED BY MISS ABNEY TO DR. WILLIAMS’ LIBRARY.]
ISAAC WATTS;
His Life and Writings,
_HIS HOMES AND FRIENDS_.
“Few men have left behind such purity of character, or such
monuments of laborious piety. He has provided instruction for
all ages, from those who are lisping their first lessons to
the enlightened readers of Malebranche and Locke; he has left
neither corporeal nor spiritual nature unexamined; he has
taught the art of reasoning and the science of the stars.”—_Dr.
Johnson._
“The Independents, as represented by Dr. Watts, have a just
claim to be considered the real founders of modern English
hymnody.”—_Lord Selborne._
LONDON:
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY,
56, PATERNOSTER ROW; 65, ST. PAUL’S CHURCHYARD;
AND 164, PICCADILLY.
MANCHESTER: CORPORATION STREET. BRIGHTON: WESTERN ROAD.
[Illustration: PREFACE.]
Most men who have left behind them a name so universally honoured and
beloved as that of Isaac Watts have shone in many biographies; he
reverses the rule, and really has more monuments in stone erected to
his memory than there have been readable biographies to record the
transactions of his life.
From time to time it seems necessary and natural to attempt some fresh
record of the memory of honoured men; even the best biographies wear out,
and succeeding ages demand a tribute in harmony with varying impressions
or increased information. The life of Watts was one of the most quiet
and equable of lives; it flowed on in almost unbroken tranquillity and
peace; it was passed in much seclusion, neither his taste nor his health
permitting him to come much personally into the presence of the world.
The authentic incidents of his career, of which we have any record, are,
indeed, very few, yet, such as they are, they should surely be gathered
up, and put into some fitting memorial. Besides this, it is a life always
good to contemplate. Acquaintance seems to lift the reader almost into
that region whose air the good man breathed so freely.
The object of the following pages will be to attempt to do some justice
to the various attributes of his mental character. His fame as a writer
of hymns has, by its very brightness, obscured departments of work which
cost him far more labour. Watts was modest; in every estimate of himself
he disclaimed any title to the rank of a poet; but in truth his powers,
as manifested in his writings, whether we regard him as a preacher,
theologian, or metaphysician, are all equally luminous and instructive.
Beyond all these, a character exalted by seraphic piety and all-embracing
charity makes the narrative of such a life well worthy of the study of
all to whom it is pleasant to contemplate human nature in the finer
proportions of genius, sanctified and illustrated by Divine grace. It is
curious, and almost amusing, to notice that Samuel Johnson quite tamed
down his rugged temper and speech when he wrote the life of Watts. He
speaks of him as one who maintained orthodoxy and charity not only in his
works but in his innermost nature: not a discourteous or disrespectful
word flaws the sketch he has written.
Watts was the Melancthon of his times,—not only in the ranks of
Nonconformity, but within the pale of the Establishment there was no
other mind so resembling the mild and uniform spirit, and graced by
the many-coloured scholarship of the great Reformer. It cannot indeed
be expected that those should know or care for Watts, who are not in
affinity with his mild and temperate, and yet majestic nature. Equally
removed from the servility which would have enslaved, or the fanaticism
which would have inflamed, the portrait of Watts is one which will
be studied to advantage at all times. When Johnson characterized the
philosophical and literary writings of Dr. Watts as “productions which,
when a man sits down to read, he suddenly feels himself constrained to
pray,” he also describes the influence which the reading or the study
of his whole life is calculated to have upon the mind. It is not fertile
in personal incidents, but it has been well remarked that the Christian
biography has other objects—it may be hoped that many other biographies
have higher objects—than that of merely exciting the imagination, or
agitating the mind by the recital of romantic adventures, brilliant
actions, or daring exploits. Watts reminds us of that saying of Richard
Sibbes, that “a Christian must be neither a dead sea nor a raging sea.”
His frequent illnesses, as in the case of Richard Baxter, “set him upon
learning to die, and thus he learned how to live.” For the greater
portion of his life he lived painfully within sight of the world to come;
he hovered on the border-land of life; he is a fine illustration of power
in weakness, and he adds another to the list of those men who surprise us
by the results of amazing industry, plied beneath all the interferences
of sickness, and a weak and fragile frame.
Thanks are due, and are hereby heartily rendered, to the Rev. Herman
Carlyle, LL.B., of Southampton, for permission to engrave the portrait
from the vestry of Above Bar Chapel—it has never been engraved before,
and is believed to be the portrait presented by his pupil, early in
life, to the Rev. John Pinhorne, master of the Southampton Grammar
School; and also to J. Hunter, Esq., of Dr. Williams’ Library, for his
invariable courtesy, and for permission, obtained through him, to use the
portrait formerly the property of Miss Abney, and the bust, of which also
engravings are given in the work.
E. PAXTON HOOD.
[Illustration: CONTENTS.]
CHAP. PAGE
I.—BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD OF ISAAC WATTS 1
II.—IN THE ACADEMY AT STOKE NEWINGTON 15
III.—IN THE HARTOPP FAMILY 32
IV.—PASTOR OF A LONDON CHURCH 40
V.—FIRST PUBLICATION AS A SACRED POET 57
VI.—RESIDENCE IN THE ABNEY FAMILY 75
VII.—HYMNS 84
VIII.—A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS 136
IX.—THE COUNTESS OF HERTFORD AND MRS. ROWE 172
X.—SHIMEI BRADBURY 189
XI.—HIS TIMES 205
XII.—RETURN TO STOKE NEWINGTON 218
XIII.—THE WORLD TO COME 226
XIV.—THE MAN 246
XV.—DEATH AND BURIAL 258
XVI.—SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE OF PROSE WRITINGS 274
[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL’S GAOL, IN WHICH WATTS’ FATHER WAS CONFINED.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
Birth and Childhood of Isaac Watts.
Isaac Watts was born at Southampton, July 17th, 1674, the same year in
which John Milton died. He was the eldest of nine children, and was named
after his father, Isaac. His father was a truly worthy and respectable
man. In the course of the future years of his very long life, he became
the master of a school of considerable reputation in the town. Dr.
Johnson says it was reported that Watts’ father was a shoemaker. In the
year 1700 Isaac Watts, of 21, French Street, Southampton, was a clothier
or cloth factor; so he is described in legal documents which still exist
in that town; so he is described in another deed of 1719; while in 1736
he is described as “Isaac Watts, of the town and county of Southampton,
gentleman:”[1] this was the year in which he died. At the time, however,
of Isaac’s birth, deep grief was round, and heavy distress over the
household. The father was a Nonconformist, and a deacon of that which is
now the Above Bar Congregational Church in Southampton. It was a cruel
time; the laws were very bitter against Nonconformists, and the traveller
through Southampton in many months of the year 1674-75 might have seen
a respectable young woman, with a child at her breast, sitting on the
steps of the gaol seeking and waiting for admission to her husband. It
was the mother of Watts, and the daughter of Alderman Taunton. Tradition
says, she was French in her lineage, of an exiled Huguenot family, driven
over to England by intolerance and the massacre of St. Bartholomew, in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Thus Watts was the child of persecution,
and through all the earliest years of his life his mind must have been
habituated to such impressions and associations as were well calculated
to draw out and give sharpness and distinctness to his convictions. The
old prison remains very nearly the same as when the young mother sat
with her child looking up to the barred room in which her husband was
confined. It stands upon the beach of the sweet Southampton waters, which
then rolled much further in, and almost washed the prison doors. Legend
asserts that it was only a few steps from this spot that Canute fixed his
chair when, in order that he might rebuke the adulation of his courtiers,
he commanded the waves to retire. Perhaps the imprisoned man turned to
the incident, and thought of One who is able to still the noise of the
waves and the tumult of the people, and to say to all billows, “Hitherto
shalt thou come, and no further.” If able to climb to the tower of his
prison, a lovely scene opened to his view: the charming hills of Bittern
on the left; the “sweet fields beyond the swelling floods” opposite, on
the right of the Southampton waters; at his foot the old houses of the
quaint little town, and his own persecuted abode.
The author of “The Christian Life in Song” has not unnaturally conceived
that probably to his mother he was indebted for the lyrical tendencies
in which at a very early period his faith sought to express itself. The
French Huguenots led the way in the utterance of feeling in sweet sacred
hymns; and the grieving young mother might perhaps refresh her faith by
some of the strains of her old people, while little knowing that she
held in her arms one who was to eclipse the fame of Clement Marot in
this particular. As to the imprisonment of the father, a licence had
been issued in 1662 by Charles II., under the signature of Arlington,
allowing “a room or rooms” in the house of Giles Say to be used for
congregational worship, and Mr. Say, himself an exile and refugee from
the persecutions of France, to be “the teacher.” In a short time this
licence of indulgence was withdrawn, and Mr. Say and his chief supporters
were thrown into prison; one of the principal of these, as we have seen,
was Isaac Watts the elder. It was an unpromising commencement to an
illustrious life; and this trouble was no sooner escaped from than it
was renewed. Liberated from prison, Isaac was still a very young child
when his father was imprisoned again on the same charge for six months.
In 1683 he was obliged to flee from home into exile from his family.
Where he passed his time we have no exact information, but for two years
he was living principally in London; and thus the family continued to
pass through a course of domestic suffering until those happier days
came which brought the abdication of the Stuart family and in honour of
which, on the succession of William, we cannot wonder that Isaac Watts
was glad to pour out some of his earliest verses.
Watts sprang from a fairly good family. Alderman Taunton, his grandfather
on his mother’s side, is still remembered in Southampton by his public
benefactions. The grandfather Watts had been engaged in the naval
service, and was commander of a man-of-war in the year 1656 under
Admiral Blake. He appears to have been a man of great courage and many
accomplishments. He had some skill in the lighter recreations of music,
painting, and poetry. A story is told how in the East Indies he had a
personal conflict with a tiger, which followed him into a river; he
grappled with the monster, and got the better in the conflict. In the
Dutch war the vessel he commanded exploded, and thus in the prime of life
he met his end. It has been tenderly remarked that “the grandmother Lois”
is often as influential on the opening mind as “the mother Eunice.” The
widow of the gallant sailor, and grandmother of the poet, had not only
many stories to tell of her husband’s adventures, but seems to have been
remarkably amiable, if she may be judged by the glowing verses in which
her grandson sought to do honour to her memory. She sought to instil into
his mind the lessons of early piety, and exercised an influence over
his early education during the time when trial and grief were strong in
the household of her children. The old people appear to have possessed
considerable property, but it was probably much diminished during those
persecuting times. Such was the stock whence the poet was descended. We
may speak of it as a good strong root, both upon the father’s and upon
the mother’s side. A sap of nobleness and gentleness seems to have given
vitality to both families, and to have left its best influences in their
child.
Isaac Watts the elder was a man of great social worth. In after years his
boarding-school became a most flourishing establishment, and children
were sent to it to receive their training both from America and the West
Indies. There is a document written to his family when he was living
in exile from them, which places his high principles of character, his
prudence and his piety, his strong Protestantism, and his intelligence in
a very remarkable light. He also had a taste for sacred verse, and many
of his pieces have been preserved breathing a saintly meditative spirit.
Mr. Parker, the amanuensis of Dr. Watts, mentions a singular anecdote to
illustrate how his advice was sought by persons of the town on account of
his reputation for wisdom. A person, a stonemason, in Southampton, had a
dream. He had purchased an old building for its materials; previous to
his pulling it down he dreamed that a large stone in the centre of an
arch fell upon him and killed him. Upon asking Mr. Watts his opinion,
he said, “I am not for paying any great regard to dreams, nor yet for
utterly slighting them. If there is such a stone in the building as you
saw in your dream” (which he told him there really was), “my advice to
you is, that you take great care, in taking down the building, to keep
far enough off from it.” The mason resolved to act upon his opinion, but
in an unfortunate moment he forgot his dream, went under the arch, and
the stone fell upon him and crushed him to death.
This good father lived to the advanced age of eighty-five; his son Isaac
was then in his sixty-third year, and only two or three days before his
father’s death addressed to him the following tender and satisfying
letter:—
“NEWINGTON: _February 8th, 1736-37_.
“HONOURED AND DEAR SIR,
“It is now ten days since I heard from you, and learned by my
nephew that you had been recovered from a very threatening
illness. When you are in danger of life, I believe my sister
is afraid to let me know the worst, for fear of affecting me
too much. But as I feel old age daily advancing on myself, I am
endeavouring to be ready for my removal hence; and though it
gives a shock to nature when what has been long dear to one is
taken away, yet reason and religion should teach us to expect
it in these scenes of mortality and a dying world. Blessed be
God for our immortal hopes, through the blood of Jesus, who has
taken away the sting of death! What could such dying creatures
do without the comforts of the Gospel? I hope you feel those
satisfactions of soul on the borders of life which nothing can
give but this Gospel, which you taught us all in our younger
years. May these Divine consolations support your spirits under
all your growing infirmities; and may our blessed Saviour form
your soul to such a holy heavenly frame, that you may wait with
patience amidst the languors of life for a joyful passage into
the land of immortality! May no cares nor pains ruffle nor
afflict your spirit! May you maintain a constant serenity at
heart, and sacred calmness of mind, as one who has long passed
midnight, and is in view of the dawning day! ‘The night is far
spent, the day is at hand!’ Let the garments of light be found
upon us, and let us lift up our heads, for our redemption draws
nigh. Amen.
“I am, dear Sir,
“Your most affectionate obedient Son,
“ISAAC WATTS.”
Troubled as were the early years of his life, the subject of our
biography furnishes one of those rare instances in which the precocity
of infancy was not purchased at the expense of power in maturity; it is
said that before he could speak plainly, when any money was given to him,
he would cry, “A book! a book! buy a book!” He began to learn Latin at
the age of four years, and in the knowledge of this language and in Greek
he made swift progress; it is probable that of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
he had considerable knowledge while yet a child. He is one of those who
have been said to “lisp in numbers.” His utterances of infant rhyme
are not astonishing, but every biography of him has repeated the story
how, when he was seven years of age, his mother after school-hours one
afternoon offered him a farthing if he would give her some verses, when
he presented her with the well-known couplet:
I write not for a farthing, but to try
How I your farthing writers can outvie.
It was about the same time that, some verses of his falling into the
hands of his mother, she expressed her doubts whether he could have
written them, whereupon he immediately wrote the following acrostic;
and if some of the lines seem to falter, the last two are certainly
remarkable as the expression of a mere child, and have even a kind of
prophecy in them of his future years:
I am a vile polluted lump of earth,
S o I’ve continued ever since my birth;
A lthough Jehovah grace does daily give me,
A s sure this monster Satan will deceive me,
C ome, therefore, Lord, from Satan’s claws relieve me.
W ash me in Thy blood, O Christ,
A nd grace Divine impart,
T hen search and try the corners of my heart,
T hat I in all things may be fit to do
S ervice to Thee, and sing Thy praises too.
It was perhaps from the uncertainty of tuition at home, or from the
youthful student outstripping the attainments of his father, that he
was early sent to the grammar-school at Southampton, of which the Rev.
John Pinhorne was the principal. He was a man of good character and
attainments, rector of All Saints Church in Southampton, prebendary
of Leckford, and vicar of Eling, in the New Forest. The Nonconformist
relations of his young pupil appear to have produced no uncharitable
effect upon the master’s mind. From the first he prophesied the future
eminence and celebrity of the young scholar. He died in 1714, when these
were in their dawn. Watts held him in most reverent and grateful memory,
and illustrated these feelings in a Pindaric Latin ode, which, in its
recapitulation of the classical authors, to whose pages the master had
guided his knowledge, certainly shows at once the abundant scholarship of
the worthy pair.
There, in the grammar-school of the town, in the dark reigns of the
Second Charles and James, the little Puritan was the most diligent and
advanced scholar, the beloved of his master. He very early exhibited
a great proficiency in Latin, Greek, and French. A spare, pale child,
there was perhaps nothing peculiarly prepossessing in his features, if
we except the bright, intense sparkling eye, and the quivering, nervous
expression. There was certainly nothing robust about him, but all the
indications of the future scholar. May we not also say the indications of
the future saint—a little meditative Samuel—of a time in our history of
which we may say “the Word of the Lord was precious in those days, there
was no open vision?”
These first years, when the mind was gathering to itself the many tools
of knowledge, were passed in his father’s house at Southampton—an utterly
different Southampton from that which we see now—a charming little
sequestered town; the gentle river rolled its pleasant and pellucid
waves before it, undisturbed by the iron floating bridge, as the nobler
Southampton Water rolled along between it and the Isle of Wight.
Unsullied by steamboats, it was no depôt for the great navies of the
West, but it must have been a charming country town, its streets almost
overshadowed by the noble trees of the New Forest. The historian and
antiquarian will find no lack of material for observation and suggestion
in Southampton; it is rich in old nooks and reminiscences, and as full of
material for the artist as for the archæologist. Legend and story of St.
Benedict or King Canute, of the knightly Bevis and Ascapart were, we may
be sure, not less fragrant then than they are there to-day. Many of the
old houses are standing; the old town walls, the monuments of the great
Roman road, and the noble bars of the town looked, we may be sure, more
perfect then than now; the neighbourhood in which Watts lived still bears
traces of being the oldest part of the town; other spots, which bear the
marks of nineteenth century improvements in handsome parks and squares
and streets, were then only wide, open fields; and many of the objects
interesting to those who visit English shrines have altogether passed
away. The gaol in which Watts’ father was confined, St. Michael’s Prison,
the old Bull Hall, and the buildings round the old Walnut tree—the town
retains the names of these places, and still conveys some impression of
what they were. The Blue Anchor Postern still exhibits its massive old
masonry, the relics of a building inhabited by King John, and a royal
residence of Henry III. Yet more interesting memories gather in another
part of the town, round the Widows’ Almshouses,[2] founded by Mr.
Thorner, the friend and co-religionist of Watts’ father. The little town,
from being one of the most inconsiderable, has become one of the most
thriving and famous in the empire.
Still, changed as Southampton is during the last two hundred years,
it is not difficult to realize something of its ancient character.
Its counterpart or resemblance may still be found in some of those
small seaport towns of France which have been left to their primitive
isolation by the retreating tides of population. Yet a good many things
in the old town of Southampton remain unchanged. It is full of quaint
nooks and corners, gateways and archways bearing the evident marks of
high antiquity. For a long period Southampton sank into a state of
sequestration and repose; but her early history was something like her
later, and there was a day when in the most palmy and splendid time of
Venice her connection with that great commercial republic was as intimate
as it is now with the Eastern and Western Indies. Its glory dates from
the time of the Conquest; and a circumstance ominous to England in the
landing there of Philip II., of Spain, the husband and ill-adviser of
Mary, is the last instance recorded of its prominence and splendour in
the ancient day. The old parish of All Saints, in which Watts was born,
and the neighbourhood in which his childhood was passed, remain so little
changed as to enable the visitor to carry in his mind a fair picture of
the old lanes and streets, rambling round the old church, in the middle
of the now rudely paved square.
The house in which Watts was born, in French Street, is still standing,
and seems to give the assurance of being much the same, although it
has so far yielded to the indignities of time that one side of it is a
public-house and the other a marine store. It must have been a plain
but roomy, substantial building, standing back with its garden behind
it, full of lofty rooms and rambling nooks and passages. There he first
saw the light, there he passed his play days of childhood; there the
dreamy, studious boy accumulated the first spoils of knowledge; returning
thither after his academical course was closed, there he wrote his first,
and even a considerable number of his hymns; and thither, a celebrated
man, he often came to visit his parents, even when he was an old man. A
fragrant memory of early piety and matured holiness still lingers over
the old place, and consecrates it as one of our English shrines.[3]
In his childhood circumstances happened likely to produce some effect
upon his mind. The memory of the terrible plague of 1665, in which
between one and two thousand persons were swept away, was still fresh
in Southampton for one hundred and fifty years after. The annalists of
the town tell us it did not recover from the state of decay into which
it fell from that dreadful visitation. The shops were all closed, all
who could fled from the town, and the streets were overgrown with grass.
When Watts was six years old the great comet flamed over England, with
which were associated in many minds such dreadful portents, and it no
doubt lent a colour to many of his after most imaginative conceptions.
It was an object of singularly marvellous splendour. Several years after
he seems to have put the memory of the impressions it produced upon him
into the couplets in which he alters Young’s description, and the words
sufficiently show how the surprising spectacle had excited his youthful
fancy:
Who stretched the comet to prodigious size,
And poured his flaming train o’er half the skies?
Is’t at Thy wrath the heavenly monster glares
O’er the pale nations, to announce Thy wars?
The life of Watts had very little in it at any time which related to
the history of the period in which he lived, yet it is impossible not
to notice that these first years of his life at Southampton were among
the most exciting and memorable of the country’s history. What England
was Lord Macaulay has well described in perhaps one of the most charming
chapters of his history—_the State of England at the death of Charles
II._ It was the time of England’s Reign of Terror, and circumstances
were happening, the conversations upon which must have produced a vivid
impression upon the mind of a youth of lively sensibility. The execution
of Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, the trial of Richard Baxter,
the rising of Monmouth, the tremendous descent of Jefferies in the Bloody
Assize of the West, the trial of the bishops, the flight of James, the
landing of William at Torbay, and his progress to London; these were
circumstances such as England had never seen before, such as England can
never see again, and they all crowded fast upon each other in the years
of Watts’ boyhood and early youth.
The period of the youth of Watts calls up to the mind a singularly
contradictory range of associations; it was a wild, wicked, and
frivolous time, and yet there were men living then whose names have
adorned, and will ever adorn the literature of our land. Watts was
fourteen years of age when John Bunyan finished his eventful course.
Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles, was just leaving his
academy at Stoke Newington and the Dissenters, by whom he had been
educated; Henry More, the singular mystic, preceded Bunyan by one year
to the grave; Ralph Cudworth was accumulating his immense mass of
nebulous scholarship; South was preaching his celebrated sermons, in
which coarseness so frequently “kibes the heels” of wisdom; Robert Boyle
was, with intense ardour, prosecuting his observations and studies in
natural history and science, and blending with equal ardour with them his
devotions to revealed religion and Divine truth; Barrow was pursuing his
ponderous lucubrations; Newton was expounding the system of the universe,
and Locke the system of the mind; Howe was indulging in his seraphic
ardours; Dryden was drawing to the close of an inglorious life, and
writing some of the pieces which have best served his fame; John Evelyn,
the model of an English gentleman, was studying his trees at Wootton, or
penning his entertaining diary at Sayn Court; Samuel Pepys, garrulous and
silly, was writing a history without knowing it, as the Boswell or the
Paul Pry of the court and the town; Lely was flattering a meretricious
taste by his paintings, and Christopher Wren preparing his plans for
rebuilding London.
The persecutions to which the Nonconformists through this period were
exposed of course affected society in Southampton; the avenues to
prosperity and peace seemed to lie only in conformity to the Church of
England. It was then that, in consequence of his great and promising
attainments, his diligence and high character, an offer was made to Watts
by Dr. John Speed, a physician of the town, on the behalf of several
others, to send him to one of the universities, and very handsomely
defray all his expenses there. He did not hesitate for a second, but
respectfully and firmly replied that he was determined to take up his
lot amongst the Dissenters. Two of his early friends, in every way
incomparably his inferiors, conformed, and attained to archiepiscopal
dignities. Yet, in spite of all that he afterwards wrote on the relation
of the civil magistrate to religion, there would seem to have been
little in his faith, feeling, or practice which might not easily have
found a home in the Establishment but for the persecuting spirit of the
time. It was the same year that in his slight, curious autobiographical
memoranda,[4] he mentions concisely how he “fell under considerable
convictions of sin;” in the year following, his entry runs on, “and was
led to trust in Christ, I hope.” In the same year, 1689, he mentions
that he had a great and dangerous sickness; and all these events of his
life, which look so brief and cold to us as we put them down on paper,
were great and crucial events to him, settling the foundations of his
character, probably leading him away from the pursuits of scholarship
as a mere charm and recreation of cultivated taste, to regard it as the
important means by which an entrance might be obtained to everlasting
truths. These events would add to those motives which had determined him
to renounce the idea of university training, and to seek an entrance into
the ministry through the humbler portal of a Dissenting academy.
[Illustration]